Reviewing My Genealogical Priorities

Can it really be the first of June? My blogging activities have become sporadic again, it seems. Shortly after my last posting I left on a week-long research trip to Ft. Wayne, Indiana, home of The Allen County Public Library (ACPL). This facility is one of the premier genealogical research libraries in the country and claims to be the largest such library that is publicly-funded.

The ACPL certainly lived up to my expectations. My initial goal was to search for clues to the ancestry of Henry Reynolds, one of my “brick wall” great-great grandparents. This effort was moderately successful – some good information was found in Kentucky and Virginia land records about possible members of his family.

A second goal was to look for new information about the Holladay family in the ACPL holdings for Adair County, Kentucky. These holdings are quite impressive, but I found little for Adair that is not available in Salt Lake City and no Holladay information that was new to me.

While there I also looked for new information about Zachariah Holladay’s somewhat mysterious older brother John. Here I was spectacularly successful in learning about his descendants and about the woman he married, Margaret or Margery Gustavus. John is mentioned briefly in my biographical sketch of Zacharias, especially in footnote 3, but much of his life has been a mystery to me, especially what happened after he disappears from Washington County, Kentucky, records in about 1798.

Both during this trip and since my return, this effort to find more information about Zacharias’ brother John Holladay has occupied much of my genealogy time. The trouble is, other priorities and commitments keep me from spending more than one or at most two hours per day on genealogy. I now have two more genealogical projects to pursue in addition to various tasks under what I call the Holladay Family project. These new projects are the search for Henry Reynolds (1778-1849) parents, and developing a biographical sketch of John Holladay (1755-1800). I’ll be commenting on each of these and summarizing results in future posts.